But one source close to the company tells us when Carol signed a search deal with Microsoft in late July, a lot of that good will evaporated quick.

It got to the point where Carol had to write a memo to shake employees out of the funk. She wrote, "Stop staring at our navels, stop arguing with each other. Stop debating, debating, debating, and let’s focus on the competition."

Probably, Carol also spent a lot of energy around that time explaining why she did the deal how she did the deal. So when a reporter asked her to do it again today, she seemed very practiced.

We recorded her pitch and embedded it below. The main point: If Yahoo had taken a big lump sum payment from Microsoft, it wouldn't have nearly so much cash to spend.

Watch:

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